May 29, 2012

TISHOMINGO BLUES

by Elmore Leonard

416 pages, Harper Paperbacks

Review by Bill Kirton

Elmore Leonard was born in 1925 and, by my
count, has written 49 novels as well as lots of screenplays, stories and
non-fiction books which I didn’t bother to count. He’s the consummate
professional and, in Tishomingo Blues,
written ten years ago, he was still at the height of his powers. It’s packed
with beautifully drawn, distinct characters, unashamed baddies and goodies, as
well as those who inhabit an area where it’s difficult to say which side
they’re on.

In this novel, he adds piquancy to that
ethical conundrum by making a central feature of the narrative the re-enactment
of one of the battles of the American Civil War, with his characters split
between being Yankees and Confederates. Thus, as the battle’s organised and the
details of uniforms and weapons, the deployment of troops, the hierarchy of camp
followers are all sketched, other tensions grow simultaneously between forces vying
to take over drug and real estate rackets.

At the centre of it is Dennis, a high
diver, who’s introduced right at the start in a couple of paragraphs that I
used in a blog to show how Leonard seems to need very few words to convey lots
of information. Here are the opening lines of those first two paragraphs:

‘Dennis Lenehan the high diver would tell people that if you put a
fifty-cent piece on the floor and looked down on it, that’s what the tank
looked like from the top of that eighty-foot steel ladder’

‘When he told this to girls who hung out at amusement parks they’d put a cute
look of pain on their faces and say what he did was awesome. But wasn’t it like
really dangerous?’

The
writing is spare, all unnecessary decoration has been eliminated. The sentences
are deceptively simple but carry so much more meaning than their surface
suggests. There’s the matter-of-factness of ‘would tell people’ (i.e. high-diving’s
an everyday occurrence); the comprehensive description of all the aspects of
his terrifying act in just two lines and a single image; the layers of insinuation
in ‘girls who hung out at amusement parks’; the deliberate inappropriateness of
‘they’d put’, ‘cute’ and ‘awesome’; and the smile-inducing perfection of that
final question, reinforcing the gap between the real danger and people’s
perceptions of it.

And that’s the way the book continues. It’s
sometimes raw, brutal, but it’s also tender and subtle. People are killed
almost as an afterthought or on a whim, with it hardly interrupting a
conversation. And yet it’s the killing of a dog that has the greatest
consequences. But its true glory is that the characters’ complexities, their
actions and interactions, their aspirations and plans are nearly all conveyed
through what they say. There’s very little refinement in the people here. Some
of them seem to have paid little attention to any education that may have been
forced on them, but each has a recognisable stylistic register and Leonard’s
ear for natural speech is faultless. It allows him to manufacture conversations
which not only develop and frame the narrative but also reveal the surface and
the depths (or lack of) of each individual.

As the preparations for the battle build
gradually to the conflict itself and its deadly outcome, so the book’s other
narratives are structured to keep pace with it. There’s power, humour and, yes,
tenderness. The energy never falters, the inevitability of the necessary
showdown ratchets up the tension until all loose ends are tied up and you can
at last close the book, all curiosity satisfied. It’s the work of the best
crime writer around.